Comcast Attempts to Outbid Disney For Fox

Disney’s purchase of Fox from News Corporation is not a done deal yet. Now Deadline reports that the media giant Comcast has submitted a very competitive bid for the film and television studio:

The U.S. cable giant made an all-cash offer of $65 billion to acquire much of Fox’s film and television assets, its international holdings and its stake in the streaming service, Hulu. The $35 per share offer represents a 19% premium on Disney’s $52.4 billion all-stock offer for the same assets.

In other words, Comcast might just snatch Fox and those valuable assets away from Disney, and if you’ve spent the last couple months dreaming of the X-Men showing up in Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you may want to seriously temper those expectations.

Disney could still wind up with Fox, but it will need to at least match Comcast’s bid to do so. (There’s lots of financial nitty gritty in the Deadline article if you’re interested in that sort of thing.) There’s also the matter of whether the U.S. Government would allow any of these potential mergers to go through, a process which is far more serious than a mere formality. But hey, if Comcast does wind up with Fox, you can just change your dreams and begin contemplating a world where Alien vs. Predator vs. The Fast vs. The Furious becomes a reality.That would be a heck of a thing.